``We do not stand outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadow – or veil – of oppressive cultures; we are part of that world.``

Lila Abu-Lughod

``It is far easier to talk about the tragedy of LGBTQ youth suicide than it is to find ways to comprehend and address the complexity of their lives and identities.``

Tey Meadow

“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on.``

Saidiya Hartman

``Universities and colleges are centers of knowledge production – asking hard questions and drawing on insights from across the disciplines to answer them is what we do best.``

Jennifer Hirsch

``These are revolutionary times that beg us to think, in newer and different ways, about what we will do in this moment.``

Alondra Nelson

``I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely.``

Jack Halberstam

``Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.``

Carolyn Heilbrun

``Feminist analysis can shift the frames of intelligibility so as to allow new experiences to emerge, experiences that have heretofore remained unspoken, or even unthought.``

Marianne Hirsch

The Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality is the locus of interdisciplinary feminist and queer scholarship and teaching at Columbia University.

WGSS IN PRAXIS

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Hebrew Literature, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema, Mediterraneanism, Trauma and Narrative.

``I often like to talk about feminism not as something that adheres to bodies, not as something grounded in gendered bodies, but as an approach -- as a way of conceptualizing, as a methodology, as a guide to strategies for struggle``.

Event Details

IRWGS Graduate Writing Retreat
IRWGS is hosting a two-day writing retreat Friday, October 26th from 10am to 6pm and Friday, November 2nd from 10am to 6pm. If you are looking for a

Event Details

IRWGS Graduate Writing Retreat

IRWGS is hosting a two-day writing retreat Friday, October 26th from 10am to 6pm and Friday, November 2nd from 10am to 6pm. If you are looking for a quiet place to focus, snack, and write, then please join us and bring your writing buddies! You can drop in at any time on either day. We will have students currently working on dissertation chapters, articles, essays, prospectuses, creative work, etc. There will be light refreshments and a warm communal space to welcome you.

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A Film Series Presented by the Columbia Maison Française, co-sponsored by School of the Arts and curated by Nora Philippe with the participation of Maboula Soumahoro

Films are free and open to the public. Subtitles are in English.

France doesn’t have an equivalent word for speaking about “blackness” and has just removed the word “race” from its Constitution. However, a new generation of black French women directors is creating documentaries, news reports, and fiction films about the black experience in all its plurality, from more recent immigration of Africans to France, to intimate searches for genealogical identity in the Caribbean, to feminist and political struggles in today’s troubled times. Around a selection of films directed by award-winning artists of African descent, this series will explore experiences of mostly female subjects and characters in France, but also in French-speaking Africa and in the diaspora, in the U.S. and the Caribbean. This film series includes a classic film by Ousmane Sembène (Black Girl) and many recent ones, some being shown for the first time in the U.S. Five women directors are travelling from France to be present for the series, and screenings will be followed by discussions with the director, an invited scholar from Columbia, and curator Nora Philippe or special guest moderator Maboula Soumahoro. The selected films and discussions to follow focus on the articulation between film creation and political engagement. “Ouvrir la voix,” as Amandine Gay’s film title says: a pun which means both “speaking up” and “paving the way” – may surely be the motto of this series.

Screenings take place in two locations, as indicated on the event page. Full screening list also available.

Columbia University co-sponsors of Blackness in French and Francophone Film:

Maison Française; School of the Arts; Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality; Institute for African Studies; Columbia Global Centers/Paris; European Institute; IRAAS (Institute for Research in African-American Studies) and Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Film series presented with support from the Paul LeClerc Centennial Fund, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, la Scam, and the Knapp Family Foundation.

Event Details

Feminism in South Korea: A Conversation with Professor Judy Han (UCLA)
In light of of the #MeToo movement and recent events on illegal recording incidents in South Korea, Korea Focus is organizing a moderated

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Event Details

Feminism in South Korea: A Conversation with Professor Judy Han (UCLA)

In light of of the #MeToo movement and recent events on illegal recording incidents in South Korea, Korea Focus is organizing a moderated discussion on the topic of feminism in South Korea with Prof. Judy Han. Prof. Judy Han is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA and has previously worked as an activist, artist and information designer. The discussion will cover topics on past and current feminism, LGBTQ rights and the #MeToo movement in relation to policy and law within the South Korean context. The discussion will begin with an organized Q&A moderated by a Korea Focus board member and end with a Q&A session open to the public. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Korean Research. Food and refreshments will be served.

The Center for Korean Research event, please visit their website for more information.

Organizer

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South Asian Gender Violence through Music, Film, & Discussion
What does gendered violence mean in the context of religion, culture, and socioeconomic status in South Asian countries? Why do these countries

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Event Details

South Asian Gender Violence through Music, Film, & Discussion

What does gendered violence mean in the context of religion, culture, and socioeconomic status in South Asian countries? Why do these countries continue to target their weakest and most oppressed? How can we fight for liberation? Join us for a weekend of exploring South Asian gender justice and feminism through musical performances, a short film screening, and discussions.

The event will take place on November 10th and 11th in the Ella Weed room (Milbank 203) on Barnard’s campus, starting at 7PM on both days. Dinner will be provided!

About the Speakers

Kritika Dey is the lead vocalist in the classical Indian music group, Chokher Bali. Her music specializes in Rabindra Sangeet, and her work has a special focus on Tagore and feminism.

Dina Siddiqi is a professor, author, and researcher on transnational feminist politics, gender justice, and the anthropology of human rights, with a focus on gender and Islam in Bangladesh.

Suchitra Vijayan is the founding director of The Polis Project. She is a writer, political essayist, lawyer, and lecturer, focusing on theories of violence, war, and human nature.

Event Details

South Asian Gender Violence through Music, Film, & Discussion
What does gendered violence mean in the context of religion, culture, and socioeconomic status in South Asian countries? Why do these countries

more

Event Details

South Asian Gender Violence through Music, Film, & Discussion

What does gendered violence mean in the context of religion, culture, and socioeconomic status in South Asian countries? Why do these countries continue to target their weakest and most oppressed? How can we fight for liberation? Join us for a weekend of exploring South Asian gender justice and feminism through musical performances, a short film screening, and discussions.

The event will take place on November 10th and 11th in the Ella Weed room (Milbank 203) on Barnard’s campus, starting at 7PM on both days. Dinner will be provided!

About the Speakers

Kritika Dey is the lead vocalist in the classical Indian music group, Chokher Bali. Her music specializes in Rabindra Sangeet, and her work has a special focus on Tagore and feminism.

Dina Siddiqi is a professor, author, and researcher on transnational feminist politics, gender justice, and the anthropology of human rights, with a focus on gender and Islam in Bangladesh.

Suchitra Vijayan is the founding director of The Polis Project. She is a writer, political essayist, lawyer, and lecturer, focusing on theories of violence, war, and human nature.

Event Details

"Portraiture and Enslavement at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation)" (in conjunction with Posing Modernity exhibit at Wallach Gallery"
This talk will address the only two extant oil portraits of

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Event Details

“Portraiture and Enslavement at the Thresholds of Emancipation (A Caribbean Meditation)” (in conjunction with Posing Modernity exhibit at Wallach Gallery”

This talk will address the only two extant oil portraits of enslaved women produced during the periods of emancipation in the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. By underscoring the conflictive political and ideological forces, affective dynamics, and aesthetic principles at work in their composition, it will focus on the conditions that made possible the visual configuration of black people as subjects of freedom and on its problematic re-articulation of the boundaries between the human and the animal.

Co-sponsored by: Columbia University Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Barnard Art History, Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference: Reframing Gender Violence Project, The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, Columbia University Department of Anthropology, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, Columbia University Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University Department of Art History & Archaeology, & Columbia Maison Française

Event Details

BODILY: Transing/Queering Species and Race with Kadji Amin
Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Emory University
With a response by Professor Camille Robcis, History & French, Columbia University
In an introduction to a special issue of WSQ, Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore write that scholars “have become familiar, over the past twenty years of so, with queering things” and ask “how might we likewise begin to critically trans- our world?" In this talk, Dr. Kadji Amin aims to contribute to the burgeoning inquiry into material transings of sex, race, and species, while interrogating the affirmative and even utopian valance of such inquiry through asking “What are trans crossings of embodied borders and speciated and racialized differences good for?” Dr. Amin takes a literal approach this question, and focuses on the early twentieth-century medical fervor for the transplantation of glands—in particular the ovaries and testicles—across sex and species, with distinct racializing effects.
co-sponsored by Maison

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Event Details

BODILY: Transing/Queering Species and Race with Kadji Amin

Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Emory University

With a response by Professor Camille Robcis, History & French, Columbia University

In an introduction to a special issue of WSQ, Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore write that scholars “have become familiar, over the past twenty years of so, with queering things” and ask “how might we likewise begin to critically trans- our world?” In this talk, Dr. Kadji Amin aims to contribute to the burgeoning inquiry into material transings of sex, race, and species, while interrogating the affirmative and even utopian valance of such inquiry through asking “What are trans crossings of embodied borders and speciated and racialized differences good for?” Dr. Amin takes a literal approach this question, and focuses on the early twentieth-century medical fervor for the transplantation of glands—in particular the ovaries and testicles—across sex and species, with distinct racializing effects.